Consider the Lily (34 page)

Robbie brightened up at once.

Arrangements for Kit’s trip were quickly made: by the end of the week tickets had been booked and business appointments in New York and Los Angeles hooked up.

‘I won’t be away long, Father,’ Kit informed Rupert.

‘I suppose it’s no use asking what you’re up to,’ said Rupert, directing his gaze on his son.

‘No. It’s a surprise,’ replied Kit. ‘If it comes off I’ll tell you when I come back.’

‘I’m not senile yet,’ said Rupert.

‘Tea?’ asked Matty. The family had formed a habit of taking Sunday tea in Rupert’s room – less of a party and more of a mass sacrifice, Flora privately informed Matty. Father likes to study the entrails. Matty laughed and told Flora that Rupert did sometimes have the look of a Roman senator.

As cluttered as ever, the room was hot, filled with a curious sweetish odour and Matty made a note to sort it out. Rupert was flushed and irritable.

‘Any crumpets?’ Flora had been out riding and was hungry.

Matty lifted up the lid of the silver chafing dish. ‘You’re out of luck, Mrs Dawes has sent up teacakes.’

‘Shame,’ said Kit from his position by the mantelpiece. ‘There’s a strong possibility you’ll starve.’ He looked excited, which made Matty feel miserable because she knew he could not wait to go.

‘Rotter.’

‘Why aren’t you going with him?’ Rupert jerked his head in the direction of his son, and the loosening skin under his chin folded like an accordion.

Matty put down the teapot. ‘I think I’m better occupied here,’ she said.

It was a touchy point, for Matty had hoped that Kit would ask her to go too.

‘Sensible girl,’ said Rupert, surprising his daughter-in-law. ‘I never went anywhere unless Hesther forced me. And that was only once.’ He pushed his teacup from side to side over the embroidered tray cloth. ‘Never liked abroad much.’

Flora bit into a teacake. ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t go with Kit. After all, there can’t be much more that needs doing to the house, you’ve done everything possible to turn it inside out.’ Flora realized she had blundered again the moment she looked into Matty’s face. ‘Oh, Lord,’ she said. ‘Don’t put on the wooden look, Matty. I didn’t mean it like that. Everything’s lovely.’

Kit came to the rescue. ‘Matty’s done a wonderful job.’

‘So she has,’ said Rupert unexpectedly, and demanded to know if he had to wait any longer before he was given more tea.

The point was taken up again at lunch the following day. The guests included Mr Pengeally and his wife. Mrs Pengeally stabbed genteelly at her castle pudding with her spoon. ‘Such a delicious lunch, dear Mrs Dysart. But, then, it always is these days. You work so hard and you deserve a little holiday. But I gather you’ll be staying behind when your husband goes on his trip.’ Her gaze wandered in the direction of Matty’s midriff, hovered and moved on.

‘It’s a business trip,’ said Kit. He smiled his charming, lazy smile and Mrs Pengeally wilted.

She shifted tactics. ‘Are you quite well, Mrs Dysart? You have, if I might say so, been looking a bit pale.’

Try as she might, Matty could not stop a wave of red creeping up her cheeks. ‘Perfectly,’ she said, knowing that her body, its health or productiveness, was public property in Nether Hinton.

Mr Pengeally had a habit of being a step behind in conversations. ‘We can’t have you missing the village show. It’s the high point of the year. In fact...’ he leant towards Matty, ‘I think we shall be calling on you, Mrs Dysart, for a spot of ribbon cutting.’

‘Actually,’ said Matty, who was now an attractive pink, ‘I would hate to miss the Nether Hinton show.’

To her surprise, she meant it.

Kit was aware that Matty had feelings about not accompanying him on the trip to the States, and he wanted to reassure her. The night before he left, he came to her bedroom.

‘You won’t overdo it, will you, Matty, when I’m away?’ He sat down in the chair by the window and shook out a cigarette from his case.

‘If you mean,’ said Matty a shade tartly, ‘that I might do things in the house while you are gone that you might not like, say so.’

‘No, I didn’t mean that.’

‘Good.’ Matty set down her hairbrush with a crack and, because she looked so indignant, Kit grinned.

He watched her fuss with pots of night cream and it occurred to him that, in her way, Matty gave a lot. It was years since the house had been run so well, or felt so comfortable – and who would have thought that funny, scared Matty was a born housekeeper, with a capacity to smooth and domesticate with the lightest of touches?

Kit was getting to know her: her shyness, her sudden withdrawals when he hurt her, her astringent sense of humour. There were coldnesses between them – often – irritations, and the open knowledge that they walked divergent paths. There was also the suspicion that she loved him and the fact that he did not her. Kit felt no merit in that, only distress for Matty. But he was intrigued by the things that made her up: her often surprising views, and passionate ideas on design and painting, her love of the East. Kit liked always to turn a corner to discover a fresh landscape, and Matty had something of that unexpected quality.

He tapped the cigarette on the case and became serious. ‘You must think we’re very ungracious,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Do I?’

Kit floated behind a smoke-screen. ‘I want to make you understand. For as long as we can remember the house has been the same. Decaying, yes, in need of paint, yes. We got used to it like that. So... when you came and began to put things to rights we needed time to adjust. That’s all. Like my father must have adjusted when he married my mother. It doesn’t mean to say we don’t like what you have done.’

Silence.

‘You do understand, Matty?’

She made a noise in her throat and wondered if she would tell him about Hesther.

Kit stubbed out the cigarette and went to sit down on the bed. ‘Matty, will you come here?’

Hesther forgotten, Matty got up from the stool and sat beside him. It was a warm night and Kit was sweating slightly in his cotton pyjamas. To Matty he smelt of tobacco and the whisky he had drunk after dinner and the faintest suggestion of fresh male sweat. He was as alien as anyone could be to her, and she loved him.

As usual, his hair had fallen forward and, before she could stop herself, Matty did something she had always wanted to do. She reached up and brushed it back over the damp hairline. Her fingers twined in the fair hair for longer than necessary and pressed into the skull underneath. Before she had let go, Kit’s hand had trapped hers. Slowly, he forced it on a path downwards and she felt the hammer of excitement beat in her own body. When her hand had reached its destination, Matty looked up at her husband.

‘You can, go to America with a clear conscience,’ she told him.

In reply Kit kissed her on the mouth and pushed her back onto the pillows.

The drive to Southampton did not take long. The road sliced through downland, past Chawton and Alton, Alresford, crammed itself through the centre of Winchester and out again towards Chandler’s Ford.

It was a kind, confident landscape. Nourished by the smooth slopes, productive earth and soft winds, English civilization had begun in this country of downland and watermeadow.

Matty watched villages come and go through the car window. Neither she nor Kit spoke very much. From time to time, Kit enquired after her comfort and then fell silent. She rehearsed how she would say goodbye: friendly, contained. Sometimes she sneaked a look at him and wondered why the longing to possess a person was like physical hunger, why sex did not appease it and whether feeling dulled with age.

‘Don’t wait,’ said Kit as Tyson drove into Southampton docks.

Even so, Matty insisted on inspecting the suite on the
Mauretania.
The bathroom gleamed with zinc, there was polished wood in the sitting room and a hush emanating from a deep pile carpet in the sleeping area.

‘Goodbye,’ said Kit, and held Matty in his arms. He kissed her forehead and took one of her hands. ‘Please take care.’

‘And you too. Will you write?’

He patted her shoulder. ‘Of course I will.’

The car seemed empty without Kit. ‘If ever a ship had a soul,’ Franklin D. Roosevelt said of it, ‘it is the
Mauretania.’
Matty thought of the famous dive and swoop of the ship’s pitch taking Kit away with her.

Summer... and the gardens are swarming. In contrast the rooms of the house seem cold and silent; only the patient guardians moving to and fro breathe movement into the stillness. Occasionally, I walk through them to remind myself that nothing has changed: the white dining room, the comfortable, chintzed drawing room hung with its dramatic oil paintings, chosen by my mother. The bedrooms where satin eiderdowns sit primly on top of the beds. I look at them, so daunting, so correct, and it seems impossible that they were ever rumpled or cast aside by passion.

I wonder what people think as they shuffle through? What impression do they receive from the things here – Worcester vases, marble-topped washstands, chamber pots patterned with roses, a double bed with a railed mahogany head and foot, a crocodile dressing case? Do they gain an impression of the life that flowed through the house from photographs in worn leather frames, or my father’s footwear lined up in the boot cupboard, or the gold half-hunter on the dressing stand? Possibly not.

Why should they?

But they do understand the garden. It is easier to read: to feel what happened without searching for words. For me, the garden is the leveller, the constant with infinite variety, and the passion which has no messy repercussions. After all, mistakes in a garden can be pulled up and put onto the compost heap. Its triumphs can be repeated.

How many have walked through the white garden at Sissinghurst or here, for example, and decided, ‘We’ll do that’, and gone home to Balham, Croydon, Basingstoke, Manchester and Prest-wick and, in true democracy, altered a suburban setting or a northern viewpoint to take on board another’s passion and vision? Hundreds, thousands of gardeners.

Imagine seeing this, my latest scheme (concocted in the December fallows), for the first time.

The first ingredient is the dark mass of a yew hedge. Plant white delphiniums well away from the greedy roots (mice nest in yew) to form a contrast with an arching spiraea. Thread the huge, nodding flowers of a ‘Marie Boisselot’ clematis through the spiraea. Scatter white and cream foxgloves and in front of them position a grey-leaved plant, cotton lavender perhaps.

Magic, would you not agree? Better, unlike most magic it is obtainable magic.

After thinking about it for years, I have come to the conclusion that the Miss Jekyll style of planting is too cramped. Like the spirit which must be allowed room in a life, so plants should sprawl, infuse and self-seed in natural patterns. It has taken me almost a lifetime to arrive at this point.

A warning. The white convert will rapidly discover that nothing is pure white. If you examine any white flower you will see tiny green spots, blue veins tracking through the snowiness, dramatic orange anthers. But once rooted, the idea drives a rigorous and demanding bargain. For the disciple seeks the cleansing properties of white – the desire, I submit, for the innocence that we lost in the Fall. Vita Sackville-West was right. Who can pass by pale massed blooms in a twilit garden — a memory that nourishes the spirit during winter? Who can ignore a poppy created in buttery cream, or ice white, or the stained, rumpled blooms of the
Paeonia suffruticosa
? Who can remain unmoved by the lily’s pure seduction?

I confess I
am
seduced by the paradox of the lily: by both its purity and wantonness and so, I must tell you, was my father (‘Unbalanced,’ says Thomas, but smiles all the same), and we spend the evenings consulting the books: Thomas to his antiques and paintings, myself to plants. Each to his own Holy Grail.

These are the busiest months in the nursery and in June the roses come into bloom. All through the day and into the evening the visitors come: in coaches, cars, even on foot. They crowd into the walled garden to gaze at ‘Adelaide d’Orleans’, ‘Blanchefleur’, ‘Duchesse de Montebello’, ‘Jeanne de Montfort’, ‘Louise Odier’, at ‘Maiden’s Blush’, ‘Perle d’Or’, ‘Rambling Rector’, at ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’, ‘Tuscany Superb’ and ‘Zephirine Drouhin’. They come with notebooks, hats, sticks to lean on, with babies in rucksacks and slings, in high heels and sensible shoes, driven by love, by possession, by the knowledge that if they make the journey they will arrive, at the end, immeasurably comforted and enriched.

This year Ellen Sheppey decided not to enter for the boiled potato prize at the Nether Hinton-Well-Yateley annual horticultural show (held this summer at Nether Hinton). After all, she had won it two years running and it never did to be greedy, else fate took a hand. She would miss the triumph and, it had to be said, a feeling of superiority at the sight of her potatoes, boiled to floury perfection, sitting beside the square of cardboard emblazoned with a copperplate ‘First’. As Ned said, ‘Life moves on, girl.’

Instead, this year Ellen was tackling the two-pound fruitcake competition and, fired by the additional challenge, the egg entry. After long discussions with Ned, she narrowed her sights down to the whitest egg class as being the most taxing and worthy of her skills. Last year – the year of the Great Egg Scandal – had been a lively one, and Mary Prosser’s reputation was stained as dark as the eggs which she had allegedly dipped into coffee solution. Too bad for Mary. She, Ellen Sheppey, had no need for such tactics, for she was the proud owner of the Leghorn and no other fowl laid such pearls.

Show day dawned with a mist swaddling the village. It was going to be fine and Ellen was up early, her hair crimped in curl papers. It was already warm, and her upper lip was speckled with sweat. On days like this, Ned knew better than to be helpful, so he waited until the final egg had been eased into place in a sugar box, the cake wrapped and Ellen’s sweet peas laid reverently in the basket.